Em's Ephemerae

Not Adam Lanza's Mother, But Not a Monster

2012-12-18T13:44:00.000-05:00

I read this post by Sarah Kendzior expecting to find some really dark, depraved shit in Liza Long's blog excerpts:

Long has written a series of vindictive and cruel posts about her children in which she fantasizes about beating them, locking them up and giving them away. In most posts, her allegedly insane and violent son is portrayed as a normal boy who incites her wrath by being messy, buying too many Apple products and supporting Obama.

Except...no.

The excerpts cited are in no way abusive or violent. Please, humorless hand-wringers, read the TONE. It's clearly light-hearted venting, she clearly has affection for her family (if not for her husband, and who would blame her if half of what she said about him is true), and she is clearly trying to be funny. It's the kind of stuff I would say to a friend if I had kids who were driving me crazy, and the kind of playfully hyperbolic thing you write when you're trying to be entertaining to others about the little things that drive you nuts every day, but always with background affection for those driving you nuts. Her "my son is driving me nuts" post is actually really cute, I think--to me it reads, "This kid is brilliant, but he's a fucking teenager, and I am laughing at that fact even while banging my head against the wall." I challenge you to find me a mother who has never offhandedly said "I want to throttle my kids." Plus, when was the last time you said you wanted to throttle someone and actually intended it as a threat of violence?

The SINGLE blog excerpt I grant reads disturbingly is the one about Abraham and Isaac, but it's far less so in context. The harrowing climbing journey she recounts actually having those thoughts during is with her climbing buddy Nate, NOT her son--the hike with her son makes her recall the hike with Nate. And then the following paragraph, which the other blogger also omits, is a meditation on faith and desire that springs from the story of Abraham that makes clear she's a believing Christian. When I discussed that story in Sunday school as a believer, it was always about sacrifice, not filicide. And then this part: "To give up something that you value greatly for those you love is to know the meaning of sacrifice in the Biblical sense." "Something that you value greatly," here, is climbing the mountain (which corresponds in the Biblical story to Isaac's life, messed up as that metaphor is). Those you love, here, is her kids (God in the Biblical story).

Now, I DID find her Adam Lanza post troubling because it "outs" her son, and because of the assumptions it makes about his condition and what he might do to others in the future. Her son sounds a lot like my bipolar cousin when he was young, but he is now in college and doing really well emotionally and socially. And Lanza wasn't LIKE that as a kid, best we know. He was one of the quiet ones. They almost always are.

However, I think her post started an important conversation about the miserable paucity of mental health treatment options in America. And I believe it came from an honest place of love for her son and fear from her future.

Connect the Dots

2011-10-05T21:20:00.000-04:00

Somebody stole my idea for a super-accessible site of basic facts busy people need to know about important issues in the political process: http://www.connectthedotsusa.com/

Looks like they stole the idea even before I had it, the crafty bastards. (Thank gawd. Making all those charts looks like a lot of work.) Here I was sitting at the Take Back the American Dream conference, obsessing over accessibility and attention and how to reach people outside the echo chamber, and then boom, I see a flyer for this.

It's a promising start, in any case.

Update

2011-10-05T21:11:00.000-04:00

So, funny story -- I'm now actually being paid to blog.

I am a staff writer covering politics and sundry things at Campus Progress.

Some of you might be checking this out from the link in my bio. No, it's ok, go ahead and look at when my last post was.

I KNOW, right??

Anyway, linking to this in a public place shamed me into at least thinking about updating it more often. And in the course of blogging professionally I seem to get more ideas for things to blog about personally. There are some shiny objects on the AP-style cutting room floor.

A Google+ Ode

2011-07-11T12:59:00.000-04:00

(by me, with apologies to W. Whitman)

Come my wan-faced children,
Follow to the Field Trial, get your profiles ready,
Have you your laptops? have you your sharp-edged wits?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must share my darlings, we must bear the brunt of beta,
We the youthful geeky races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient for an invite, full of pride in online friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you blogging with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Have the Facebook users halted?
Do they droop and exit Farmville, wearied by their ill-kept privacies?
We take up the task of Circles, and the Hangout and the Huddle,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer cleaner world, streamlined world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of +1 and the couch,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

How can one lead such disparate lives?

2011-07-11T12:55:00.001-04:00

As blogged by Jonathan Blanks, an epically terrible piece of prose got published on Thought Catalog (I'd already come to the conclusion that they're generally too sophomoric to bother with, but this was in another league). It was so epic, in fact, that I decided it couldn't be bound to just a single medium:

Land of Opportunity

2011-07-11T12:50:00.000-04:00

My dad wrote this Star Spangled Banner parody (and five others also posted to his YouTube profile), which won the Washington Post's Style Invitational contest that week:

"...and I feel fiiiine"

2011-05-22T02:29:00.004-04:00

Why, TNR? I'm back from a fantastic buzzy day of getting my Masters degree and laughing my ass off at rapture jokes, and you gotta go put a heartbreaking human face on the evangelical crazies. People who not only stopped saving but who spent all their savings -- and their kids' -- in anticipation of being raptured. Suckerpunch.

This sort of thing is, obviously, terrible. And maybe there is something kind of sick, or at least smug, at the root of our obsession with it. But I don't think that's ALL there is. With that, I give you five reasons why it's still OK to laugh at the rapture:

1) This is simply the stuff that memes are made of. In an Internet culture already giddy over the zombie apocalypse, we love end-times narratives that are as wacky as they are implausible. And this shit's bananas. So much that it's taken on a life of its own, in mythic rather than human proportions.

2) As people who value rational inquiry, we may look down upon those who don't -- but more importantly we find them fascinating, and terrifying. They fascinate us because we genuinely don't understand how someone can be that irrational. And they scare us because we worry about how irrationality currently rules our public discourse -- climate deniers, debt ceiling deniers, vicious homophobes. Rigid idealogues of all sorts. So when we see card-carrying members of the Cult of Irrationality throw down the gauntlet by presenting a falsifiable fact to public scrutiny -- by SETTING A DATE and putting it on BILLBOARDS fer cryin' out loud -- it's hard to resist a bit of satisfaction that THIS time -- at least -- at last -- facts might enjoy a moment of unqualified triumph.

3) And it's more than just satisfaction for skeptics. It could, dare we hope, mean real change for one or two believers. Someone who has built their life on falsehood, when confronted with undeniable evidence of its falseness, might realize that fact and do something to turn things around. Or they might not. But they might!

4) Even if believers decide not to change their ways, we might see a generation of evangelicals turning away from small-government conservatism. If they were among those who blew their life savings in anticipation of the rapture, now they get to experience firsthand what it's like to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps"!

5) End of the World parties are a heap of fun, and should really become an annual tradition.

FTR

2011-05-22T01:07:00.001-04:00

This is where that post I started to write (and thought about extensively, and debated IRL and on Twitter/Facebook) defending the appropriateness of celebrating bin Laden's death, and rebutting that oft-referenced Twain quote--would have gone, had I actually written it in time to be timely. This has been your journey into the Annals of Abandoned Intention.

How to humanely rid your apartment of mice

2011-03-01T13:32:00.000-05:00

1) Have mice who enjoy rooting through your trash, or trash that mice enjoy rooting through. Cereal crumbs and/or scented Glad trash bags (?) may aid this.

2) Listen for the telltale rustle of plastic.

3) Sneak up on the little rustler and scoop the bag out of the trash can. Hold tightly at the top. Check for frightened moving shape at the bottom.

4) Open bag outside to release the offender into the mouse diaspora, and hope it isn't clever enough to find the homeland again. Repeat as necessary. (I did this four times, and no more rustling so far...)

In Defense of Facebook (at least against self-righteous drivel)

2011-02-06T14:24:00.003-05:00

This "you need to get off facebook" video, which has been getting a large number of views, actually annoyed me enough to inspire filming a parody/response. Sure, he had a few funny lines, nice sentiments about living in the real world, and good music--but my god, the smug! the easy targets! also the smug!

Enjoy:

GMTA

2011-02-05T20:26:00.002-05:00

Speaking of crafts, here's my friend Evan on why he is watching "Portlandia" and why you should too.

Basically, Portlandia intends to do to its namesake city’s hipsters, yuppies, and yupsters exactly what Prairie Home Companion has been doing to rural Minnesota Lutherans for over 20 years: make blistering fun of them, albeit warm-heartedly, in a “sometimes this place is pretty damned absurd but hell, we still live here” kind of way....There’s a lot to unpack in the sketches....Two home-improvement show hosts spruce up a bland gift store in Northeast Portland by adding a silhouette of a bird to all the items, which magically makes them Interesting and Creative (I have seen no better send-up of both the “New Domesticity” crafting/DIY culture and the tendency of “indie” types to view their actions as “unique” when they’re really just following broad social trends).

And my friend Natalie weighs in on bridging divides and being right.

I think one of the pitfalls of the idea that "each man is his own moral authority," a moral principle by which many of us live in the US, is that we are less and less willing to go through the painful process of being told we are wrong by other people. Moreover, because of the multiplicity of ethical choices out there, many of us are beset with uncertainty as to our moral convictions. Finally, we live in a very unforgiving cultural climate in which moral failings are increasingly vilified and not forgiven, while the importance of "good" reputation for one's career is still sky-high. Having a "good" reputation, however, very often translates into "being right about everything, all the time." We are afraid that admitting to being wrong will cost us everything — our autonomy, our moral compass, and our career and social lives. We will be seen as morally "tarnished."

The Secret is...

2011-01-25T20:26:00.001-05:00

...that positive thinking won't help you recover from illness, according to an NYT op-ed.

Now, as an avowedly EX-Christian Scientist, I'm all for throwing cold water on magical thinking. Sloan is entirely correct when he says, "It is difficult enough to be injured or gravely ill. To add to this the burden of guilt over a supposed failure to have the right attitude toward one’s illness is unconscionable."

At the same time, I think his picture is incomplete. He doesn't mention the word "stress" once. It's pretty uncontroversial that stress has a negative impact on the immune system and plays a role in a number of chronic illnesses, and positivity DOES help reduce stress. Sloan only really focuses on cancer, and while there may or may not be a link between stress and cancer, the study he cites looked at personality traits (extroversion and neuroticism), not mental habits.

So positive thinking may not help you recover from illness, but it's probably still good for your health.

Domesticity, the right, and rightness

2011-01-22T21:23:00.005-05:00

A funny thing happens when I read this article. A few things.

I realize how much liberal hipster feminists and Mormon mommies have in common. And then I wonder if we of the former are somehow doing it wrong.

First, a Mormon blogger says of the dark side of conservative domestic bliss: "'In any highly homogeneous culture we all feel pressure to be and look and think and act a certain way,' she says. 'You start to think you need to be absolutely perfect in every area.'"

Wait--shit. Who CAN'T relate to this? The hipster anxiously seeking the perfect fashion and music tastes. The careerist flogged by numbers and networking. The academic lulled into groupthink or driven mad by the impostor complex. Even groups that pride themselves on their heterogeneity end up converging around some pretty homogeneous norms.

Then there's the near-indistinguishability noted in the article between the Mormon bloggers and the "Hipster Mommy Blogger" archetype. "Cupcakes and crafts" sure sounds like an evening in Williamsburg, or Allston, or Dupont...is there such a thing as hipsterdom without ennui or sexual liberation?

And then I have my expectations and biases knocked at a funny angle by actually checking out a few of the bloggers. Reading the article initially, I think: I don't see it, but can see where somebody else might get off on it, like celebrity gossip. I'm unfairly imagining an authorial voice for these women that sounds like Facebook updates: chirpy, banal, top-of-the-head chatter, cute and uncompelling. But no--some of these gals can write. They have arc and flow and freshness. I'll leave the question of whether they're propaganda machines; there ARE a lot of suspiciously professional-looking photos, but the writing feels authentic.

I've observed, I remind myself, that the awesomeness and sweetness of individual Mormons is inversely proportional to the awfulness and repressiveness of their religion. (This is of course true for many oppressive faiths but seems disproportionately true here. It's similar in that way to my childhood faith, Christian Science, which attracts a startling number of very sensible people using some very bizarre metaphysics. But that's another post entirely.)

And domestic happiness can, dammit, CAN BE AND IS enjoyed equally by liberal feminists and traditionalists.

But we seem to take a lot more time and trouble to get to it. Agonies over careers, and cities, and above all, finding The Right Guy. We have more time to hem and haw over the latter, free of the rush to get hitched so we can finally be allowed to just bang already.

Are we too concerned with rightness? Right guyjobplacetime. Right tastes--being cool, attaining status. Our greater breadth of choice may choke us for fear of making the wrong one.

LDS is concerned with rightness of its own, a stifling level of propriety and chastity that I don't covet one bit. But don't they kinda have it right on an evolutionary scale, even if for the wrong reasons? Fertility...and biology...and LALALA I'M NOT LISTENING! I'LL HAVE BABIES! I'LL BE FINE!

OK, calm down. I could've married my college boyfriend, and even been pretty happy, but neither of us really knew who we were or what we wanted then. I value taking the extra time to figure out what a sexually compatible partnership that suits my best heart and highest goals might look like.

The appeal of these blogs, says Matchar, is that they make motherhood look joyful and uncomplicated. I think they also make it look well-integrated with their social and creative lives. And...wholesome. Not old-fashioned and cute, but whole. Positive, yes, but also grounded deeply in love.

That, right there. That's what I want.

I wonder if the other side sees emptiness and debasement in liberal culture because they think that we are too busy searching for ourselves to be devoted to others. Trying to be right instead of good.

Of course, we could say they're too busy being righteous to care about people's rights, and neither characterization would be totally fair. (Incidentally, I wonder if the small-government stinginess that tends to accompany such views is actually less about "individual freedom" than a focus on the very small group.)

There's another disturbing wrinkle. A former-Mormon-blogger commenter at Jezebel says that for all the niceness, "the culture often doesn't really allow women to be honest about imperfections, unhappiness, etc."

It seems intuitively obvious that repressing your problems is psychologically damaging. But that requires being aware of your problems on some level. What if...what if this dishonesty actually makes them happier? Shit, you know, maybe it does. We may be right about the realities of our lives and the world, but is that good?

Of course, being right, or rather being certain of being right, is also very satisfying. We and our Mormon sisters each have a certain amount of either freedom or security that we're unwilling to trade--in a non-9/11 sense--and we're certain that's the right amount. At the same time, we all cast a curious or longing glance now and then at the lives we might have lived but for different choices or value patterns.

What I come back to is this: if you can manage to do whatever it is you're doing for the love of it, then right gives way to good. "Should" becomes "is" and "is becoming." What we liberals might be reacting to in these blogs is deep love, embodied in a way familiar yet foreign. It's certainly idealized, and it may spring from not-so-right treatment of women. (We should always be attuned to what good our right is or isn't doing.) But the love--the purpose--is primal, and all of us have access to that. So we don't really need to fear doing it wrong.

Coda: what I really want is Elizabeth Barrett Browning's marriage. Dominick Argento, you destroy me.

I did a thing.

2011-01-21T20:12:00.002-05:00

That thing was this thing. A "dada flashmob" in connection with the American Repertory Theater's production of "The Blue Flower."

So you got a Facebook mommy

2011-01-20T18:56:00.002-05:00

As more and more of my Facebook friends reproduce, which is frightening, I'm noticing a trend that I'm honestly not sure whether to find frightening--people creating Facebook profiles for their newborns. On one level it makes sense and is a natural extension of social media culture, one that I could see myself indulging when I have a kid. You want to be able to clickably reference the people who matter to you, after all. There's a feeling these days that if you didn't tag it, it didn't happen. Making a profile for your new little person makes them a person in your online world too, and there's a feeling of completeness in being able to list them along with your other family members. And what a handy way to catalog and show off baby photos!

But. What on EARTH is going to happen to those profiles when the kid grows up? What will the social media habits of kids who have been on Facebook since birth look like? Kids are using the computer at incredibly young ages; when will they be granted the password to "their" account? Will they be able to friend their first grade classmates? Will younger and younger kids be meaner and meaner to each other in cyberspace? Will changing the password or even deletion be an act of teen rebellion? (If you were a teenager, would you keep an account that has 4,806 photos of you from birth through awkward phase and a bunch of Mom's old college friends who thought the page was cute? Or would you be too attached to it because at this point your whole life is on there, and nobody goes to that much effort to look up embarrassing old posts anyway because everybody has similar ones?) What will be their concept of privacy, if any? Will there be a backlash against the accepted culture of sharing and oversharing?

And most importantly, will they all stay off my lawn?

Rinse and repeat:

2010-07-15T17:23:00.001-04:00

The longer the gap between posts, the greater the vacuum, the greater the sense of needing something sufficiently voluminous to fill it, the longer the gap between posts.

I've been in Seattle this summer, and I suppose in more of an absorbing/experiencing than distilling/producing mode. And there's been a lot of creative Eros energy flowing in interesting ways, mostly through theatre. So there's that.

Found?

2010-05-25T12:51:00.000-04:00

This AV Club article on the LOST finale is excellent, so much so that I don't feel the need to add a LOT of my own ramblings. It aligns closely with my reactions, what worked and what didn't, and assessments of the series as a whole (flawed but still really enjoyable and good).

While, like Murray, I loved the episode up until a distinct hollow ring in the church scene, I was more aghast at the plot device than he was. All along we were assured that the island wasn't purgatory...but we still got purgatory in the end. It felt lazy. I can see it, kinda; it illuminates why everybody's sideways lives seemed like wish fulfillment on the surface, except for where they still had all of the same problems. But I don't think it did justice to the show's rich mythology and mystery. Like BSG, it was a deux ex "whoops look at the time gotta go." I did like what Murray said about the mysteries being more plot-drivers and mood-setters, and that's a helpful way to think about it. Still, it felt like none of the crazy crap that happened on the island mattered, REALLY--they may as well have been guarding a hat from a rabbit, because Jesus told them to, and occasionally getting struck by lightning. In both cases, I was frustrated that shows which derive tremendous energy from 1) good writing and rich characters (though BSG's writing was better); and 2) mystery and mythology, choose to content themselves with wrapping up only one of those things satisfactorily. Though despite those frustrations, BSG remains about my all-time favorite show, and LOST one that I remember fondly.

It doesn't excuse lazy plotting, but maybe the nagging sense of LOST's questionable purpose works, insofar as the show has been a metaphor for the struggles and vagaries of life. Good and evil are powerful but often inscrutable concepts, and none of us get a satisfactory explanation for why we are put here or why we die. (Even if an episode called "What They Died For" doesn't satisfactorily explain just that. Ji-Yeon's still an orphan, goddammit...oh hell.)

One last thought. I wonder how long Hurley stayed at that job? And I wonder what there was to protect the light from after Smokey was snuffed? Cause the job seems...spectacularly boring. Even with Ben around. Maybe that's why Jacob crashed ships into the island--he needed some entertainment other than Magic Mommy Chess!

So LOST

2010-05-23T19:47:00.000-04:00

Jack is our Shepherd?? DO NOT WANT.
He maketh us to wake up in green jungles;
He leadeth us beside the woogy Jacob waters.
He restoreth my ire at lazy good/evil archetypes that explaineth all.
He leadeth me in the paths of OMG, for fuck's sake!
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Smokey,
I shall fear no plotholes; for LOST has still been a fun ride.
My cup runneth over;
Surely hangovers will follow me all the days of my life
If I actually take a shot every time Hurley says "dude."

Fill o' Philo

2010-05-23T14:24:00.001-04:00

I'm looking forward to seeing the discussions unfold on Ned Resnikoff's new Philoblog. Already he's posted and addressed some stuff I brought up, which is nice. His stated goal is to make academic philosophy less obtuse for the smart but not formally trained. I'm all for that.

I only have a few classes' worth of philosophy under my belt. My professor freshman year told me I should major in it after reading my papers, but I never went for it. Part of me wishes I had, even though my English/Creative Writing major was lovely. I value art and language as ways to find and share truth in an intuitive way; in the left-brain corner, I also value rigorous thinking and dialogue. So I am intrigued by philosophy, glancing sideways and picking up bits and pieces, sensing (worrying?) that I ought to know more about it if I want to play with the other smart kids. But there's resistance too. A sense that academic jargon gets in the way of good communication of ideas. Uncertainty over how well certain theories really illuminate on-the-ground truths. My own faith in the human animal learning about itself through the scientific method and building beliefs on facts (hence my question to Ned).

Still, even the self is an abstraction. Perhaps it's only natural then, and worthwhile, to spend time further abstracting.

Babies v. Culture?

2010-05-22T15:42:00.000-04:00

I was reading this article from a few weeks ago in The-The New York Times on the moral lives of babies; I recommend you do the same immediately if you have any curiosity about human nature.

The conclusions reported here make plenty of intuitive sense, evolutionarily speaking. Of course baby brains aren't blank slates, because they can't learn or perceive specific things without the pre-wired ability to do so. And of course we have an innate, evolutionarily derived capacity for empathy, even if it's primitive and in-group-focused, because we are social animals that survive best in groups. Still, the relative sophistication of babies' understanding of social interactions, of not only good/bad but also just/unjust, is pretty darned neat.

But where it gets really interesting (and where I have a thought to add below) is page 6-7, discussing the implications for "higher" morality and society, and whether higher morality must have a divine source:

The notion at the core of any mature morality is that of impartiality. If you are asked to justify your actions, and you say, “Because I wanted to,” this is just an expression of selfish desire. But explanations like “It was my turn” or “It’s my fair share” are potentially moral, because they imply that anyone else in the same situation could have done the same.

...The aspect of morality that we truly marvel at — its generality and universality — is the product of culture, not of biology. There is no need to posit divine intervention. A fully developed morality is the product of cultural development, of the accumulation of rational insight and hard-earned innovations. The morality we start off with is primitive, not merely in the obvious sense that it’s incomplete, but in the deeper sense that when individuals and societies aspire toward an enlightened morality — one in which all beings capable of reason and suffering are on an equal footing, where all people are equal — they are fighting with what children have from the get-go. The biologist Richard Dawkins was right, then, when he said at the start of his book The Selfish Gene, “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.”

...It is the insights of rational individuals that make a truly universal and unselfish morality something that our species can aspire to.

Well said, but I would go even further. I don't think that higher morality is at war with our primitive moral sense. I think it's a logical extension of it. We wouldn't have the basis for culture in the first place without our innate ability to be fair and play well with others. Yes yes, wars and genocides and etc., but through it all, our definition of "others" has shifted and expanded as our world has. We have mapped our micro awareness that people should be nice onto our macro awareness that the world is full of people just like us. And of course this predates globalization; the article notes the impartiality found in Confucius and early Christianity and on and on. Humanity had already grown up quite a bit by then, and continues to grow, but nothing grows without seeds. Of course we have conflicting impulses such as self-interest that get in the way of our highest morality. But the one is no more innate than the other. We're not at war with our baser selves; if anything, our baser selves are at war with themselves.

tl;dr of my first post

2010-05-19T08:07:00.001-04:00

Say it with me, folks...GET OUT OF MY HEAD RANDALL

Squishy Logos

2010-05-19T04:46:00.002-04:00

I am not Athena. That is, I did not spring fully formed from someone's head. This has been a difficult realization to come to. Not that I have parthenogenesis envy; sexual reproduction is ok by me (that's...what she said?). No; the issue is completeness. Writing as product makes writing as process nervous. Dionysus and Apollo exchange uneasy glances over the table. The written word, to say nothing of the published, carries authority, which implies finality.

And egads, that's nerve-wracking.

So this little corner of the Internets is my exercise in terror and desire. Terror of inadequacy and failure, desire to grow and contribute. At some point the latter needs to bop the former on the nose and start running for dear life.

I've always been concerned with truth, with finding the right words or ideas. But truth can be a tyrant sometimes. It can seem the exclusive domain of someone else. It can become as unobtainable as it is unimpeachable: in the beginning there was Logos, and it was Good, and that was It. But wisdom and reason, Athena's spheres, are not really fixed points. Wisdom gets in shape by stumbling around a bit first. It's actually pliable and permeable. Logos is squishy.

When someone asked me as a little girl what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say, "A writer, and an actress, and a singer!" As a student of opera performance, I'm working on the latter two. Opera is a kind of Olympian endeavor itself, the superhuman amplification of a human voice in service of the highest drama and most breathtaking music. It's awesome, which is why I'm pursuing it. But then there's that writers' voice. It's been quieter for a while, but it's started flailing its hand in the air to be called on, and it needs a little discipline and structure (or else more Adderall).

Thus, this collection of ephemera. Passing fancies, some longer and more thoughtful than others. Bits of stardust that might spiral into the shape of things to come, or might just sparkle prettily. You can expect to hear about language, music, culture, politics, memes, and little things that I think are neat. And in the course of telling you these things, squishily, with what words I have, I expect to be humbled, challenged, and wrong. I expect to look back on posts a year or two later and cringe. But I expect to have fun, and to carry on, and to contribute to the conversation.

So give me your hands, if we be friends, and I'll show you where the swimming pool is, and pinky swear that this will be a pretty good time.